New Labours

In starting a blog, I feared a descent into narcissism (or at least the exposure of such stuff). The self is dull, no? The self is the property of the 20th century—psychoanalysis, mass consumerism and advertising, the image of the mordern painter, writer, film star, hippies, yuppies, addicts and patients. This notion: I am the measure, as are you and you and you, this revolution of self-consciousness is two-fold. It birthed and births some freedom, but also becomes a berth for age-old enemies: conformity, slavery, fascism, debt, dependence, isolation. I find I am overwhelmed by the depth of the subject.

Here we have Walt Whitman, four decades before the dawn of the 20th century, calling upon self-love and self-discovery as the answer to equality, to the recognition of glistening, universal humanity—reason to free slaves and women and homosexuals and all who feel bound, end war, become more spiritual beings in communication with nature, better Americans. Whitman had faith, perhaps tragically blind faith, in the notion that people who celebrated and respected the self would progress, as in Leaves of Grass, from the interior to the exterior. Self-love could make one closer to all of the other selves of the population. We have these interior and exterior lives from nature—no poet wholly wrote them into existence—but, less clear, is whether the ability to discriminate or not discriminate in our interior and exterior lives is from nature. Tolerance is taught. More often, hatred and fear, the handiest tools of tyrannical governments and corporations, are taught. We can be socialized to fear and hate ourselves and others; these very sins can be made into our bread, our existence, however empty.

Free associatively (thank you, Sigmund), I find myself wondering if Germans followed the parade, slaughtered millions of "misfits" and Jews, mostly because they didn't want to be lonely. Though horrified by the reductiveness of the thought, I do see that there is something in it. Self-consciousness and its cousin, self-confidence, are tricky substances. They can be real, enlightened, healthy (and how can we verify that?!); and we can be sold them by Adolph Hitler or the slightly more benign fashion and automotive industries.

But I digress, I'm sure. However insurmountable (and often deliciously so) a general topic "the self" may be, specifically, it is paramount to any communication. We must inspect and know ourselves, before we can attempt to know others, to know society and culture, all of us in conjunction. I find that my writing is often naive. I reread my posts on this strange recent, micro-cosmic history that absorbs me, my own youth, the years 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. I write it because it is vivid, because it is what I know. In the first decade of the 21st century, we fear our own selfishness, as it absolutely consumes us. I think we must confront that very selfishness, not by nun-ishly casting it aside, but by diving right into it and coming to the surface and seeing ours and everyone else's head, above water or drowning.

Economically hopeless seasons, like the Fall of 1932 and the present, make way for politicians who can miraculously gain the ear of individuals by calling for service and attention to others. The root may be selfish, more are drowning, more will finally vote like the drowning, the "other"; but the outcome can be (and has been) great for the whole. We could find a way to free ourselves from the wild, complex bonds of our era. We may again become citizens, something far greater than consumers. All the while, we must continue to look at ourselves, at our habits, at our appetites with measured curiousity, not shame or loathing. Shame in ourselves has only ever driven mongers of fear and hatred and rendered us inactive.